The Shattering
by skywalker05
Summary: He was a respected teacher, a well-known Warlock - and then he found the Hive. The story of Toland's exile.


Enough Guardians wanted to watch the trial that the Vanguard moved it into the solarium and posted a guard at the bridge, and let the presence of the Speaker dissuade the rest.

The Void wouldn't have been agitated except for them, Ikora thought: both rookies and long-time acolytes stood out there now, gossiping about the rituals of the trial and how it was or was not like the justice of the Concordat. Their attitude was mixed, Ikora thought, some convinced of or satisfied by the trial and others more personally against such an execution of the Vanguard's power, but both groups would stay on the other side, out of a respect for the Traveler's Speaker much greater than that which they felt for the Vanguard's table. The Speaker remained on his balcony, emanating.

Toland stood in front of Ikora, unbound.

Black hair, black robes, a slight slouch to his narrow shoulders: Toland looked exactly like what he was: one of the most well-known Warlocks in the Tower, if not the most well-liked. His Ghost hung just to the side of his left shoulder, unobtrusive and very still.

She had acknowledged and released the idea that he was her fault. Something in his research had unhinged him, and Ikora approached the process of investigation with a cool certainty. The Traveler was both before and behind her, its presence at her back while she knew that the orb itself hung in the sky over the City. It would have been visible if she had been able to see ahead of herself through the Tower. Its Light filled her, cocooned her, made blades and bullets of her hands.

She could hear the Guardians outside thinking, as if hearing the breath of someone standing close to her. Agitation, curiosity, vengeance, all lifted up the Traveler, and Ikora parsed the thoughts as they went by. They brushed at her own thoughts, so that the Vanguard could be the voice of the Tower in truth - accord reached by the general etheric chatter Ikora pulled out of the air. Behind her, Brask and Zavala read their own impressions in their own way, Brask with an attitude of hungry pursuit and Zavala deep-rooted in discernment, discarding the embryonic ideas with decisive violence.

Toland kept his Light folded under like the lining of a cloak.

A student - an acolyte - had told Ikora to take Toland in. The student had wrung her hands, said that even though she hadn't _been there_ she felt like she had blood on them.

Toland, Ikora thought, would have fought if the full brunt of Ikora's light hadn't stunned him so decisively.

With the Speaker watching behind him, Toland's roiling anger had subsided into a deeper, more distant contemptuous contemplation. He had returned to thinking about the research he had done before he was brought here, as if the Vanguard were just stepping stones in his pursuit of his project. He moved like the gyroscope, inevitably pushed by some machinery beyond him and, in any direction, falling.

Ikora was going to turn away a son of her order, and she was going to turn away a dangerous weapon.

"You have your chance to plead your case," Ikora said, and Toland nearly slammed into her.

"To whom?" The other Warlock spat, the edges of his cloak whipping as he suddenly turned and paced along the edge of the gyroscopic map. None of the Vanguard moved. Toland knew, of course. He knew why he was called here, and he spoke anyway, inviting rhetoric. Perhaps he wanted to bait her. "The Consensus? Do you think they would understand what _we_ speak of?"

Ikora raised her hand over a hiss. Toland finished his tirade with the words "dribbling monsters."

Behind her stood Zavala, a silent tower. Brask, his cloak wrapped around himself as if against the cold, hung back not out of reluctance but with the precise eye of a trained sniper. The Hunter emeritus kept his distance from Toland.

"To _me_ ," said Ikora. "Right now."

"Hmm." Toland straightened out of a hunch, steepled his hands together like a parody of a wizard. If Ikora was being mocked, she didn't care.

"Your Warlocks told me what you have done," she said. People _knew_ this person, she kept thinking. He was an immortal like the rest of them who sometimes held himself like an old man, thin shoulders slumped and feet dragging. When he fought it was with a slippery grace that made up for his flat-footed slouch. He dragged himself as if tired of his own body, as if followed by a slimy trail like a snail. Warlocks called him Toland the Vitreous, a surface things slid on. He was respected.

He didn't glance at the crowd. Spoke in a voice that curled sentences in on themselves at the end. "There are greater things than questions of blame. There are greater orbits."

Ikora swallowed, tried. "You are a respected member of our order. The weapon smith asked me to spare at least your designs. Why break that covenant?"

Toland looked over her shoulder, maybe to meet Zavala's eyes. He didn't answer her, but a muscle twitched in his cheek.

When he didn't answer, Ikora raised her voice. "You took your studies of the Darkness too far, Toland. Give me a chance to give you pity."

He kept looking at Brask, who ran out of either pity or patience.

"You're accused of … it's a long list," Brask growled. "Unethical experimentation. Theft. Heresy." A pause. "Requesting a look at the Red Death."

"But mostly," Zavala said, "This."

Ikora knew he held out the bond by the sound of metal clicking together.

Toland smiled sideways. "If you're going to exile me … " A long look at Ikora. "You'd better do the _whole thing._ _"_

He presented his Ghost.

It was a disgusting gesture, more-so because Ikora could sense the Darkness in the golden glow that circled both Toland's fist and the white Ghost. She remembered other exiles, and it looked like Toland did too. He handed his Ghost over to be given to the Speaker in pieces.

"Does it have a name?" Ikora asked, while the little machine hovered.

"Ampilyne."

"Hello, Ampilyne," Ikora said, hoping that she had found something she could be kind to.

The Ghost floated forward. One of its edges was cracked and blackened, the tiny triangular cap almost burnt away. When the Ghost opened for a moment, a tiny expression of nervousness or a respectful tip of the hat, the cap was almost invisible except for its darkness.

"We'll need its recordings," Ikora said.

"Why shouldn't I just tell you?" Toland met her eyes. "You know of my research so far — "

"And quite thorough and far-reaching has it been - " Ikora said.

He talked over her. " — So there is little left except the thing itself."

He wanted to stare her down, she thought. The ancient young ones liked to do that - to toy with their immortality, to try to shock the Vanguard. The only thing that worked was ignoring the Vanguard, which had lead to some unusual assignments but no outright expulsions.

Toland the Vitreous did not want to be ignored.

"Show me Ampilyne's role in this," Ikora said.

Toland wrenched his eyes over to hers now, and started to talk like he was in for the long haul.

* * *

The stars have loyalties of their own. Gravity, yes, ties them together with their planets and also comes from inside them, and loyalty is also this way. It creates itself, and the deep things, the low places in space-time where the fog comes, creates it too.

Olan was a good tyro. Quiet and thorough, Olan studied with Toland's small group of acolytes between patrols. He had carried his supplies quietly, and now lowered the bag to the ground. It scraped on the stone, sending echoes bouncing around the cave.

The stars were tumbling outside, and the Void felt like small waves lapping at a shore.

Out here, without other minds encroaching on the patterns, Toland thought that he could build something.

Or re-build? There was no building with the Hive, only re-creation and adaptation. With decay as their method of creation they took death by the tail, and pinched the skin of the world until it opened. They took things apart.

"Here." He spoke to Olan over his shoulder. "Put it down there."

"The Reef might be putting up with another bombardment right now," Olan said.

Under his helmet, he was a long-haired, round-faced Awoken. When Toland didn't reply, he continued. "People are asking, you know...Why you aren't letting them in here. Why you won't help the Reef when you come here."

"Did you bring the chalk?"

"Yes."

"Stand over here. Good. Don't cross the lines."

With a shushing sound, Olan set the bag down next to the dark, flat shining circle of stone and waited while Toland made the arrangements. Chalk just so, rocks just so. Everything must be neat when tearing the universe open.

When the signs and rituals were complete he unslung his gun (not _the_ gun, not the one still laying in silvery pieces in his rooms and in his mind) but a gun, a mechanical piece of what had once been Earth, and walked around the circle. He chanted the names he knew and started to feel them resonate through the universe, touching the Void at its edges, curling them like the black, crumbling edges of dying fungi. Olan watched wide-eyed, his presence also reaching out without intent but with attentive hope that he would see something astounding.

Toland made a little more than a complete circle and then raised the gun and shot Olan in the face, just over the right eye, from about two feet away.

The Hive worshipped mastery of one thing other another.

Toland braced and aimed for the Ghost, which had already entered its open phase and hovered over the body. It twitched faintly, uttered, "Why did you do that?"

The next shot missed the center sphere but broke one of the smaller ones out of its orbit. The Darkness of the bullets trailed the falling pieces like oily black lines.

This part needed to work, or the rest would not. Toland pressed his top teeth against his bottom lip, fired again. The Ghost core popped, raining sparking shrapnel onto Toland's helmet. He let out a relieved breath. "There, there, let the process work."

Olan's body had begun its rapid decay and rebuilding, but there was enough left to push it and the dust of its remaking into the circle, smudging several of the chalk lines.

They hadn't been the important part, anyway. Toland flinched back from the circle as soon as he let go of the body, the armored hand rapping on the floor. His own Ghost said, "We did it. Did the process … ?"

The lines began to smolder.

The body made Toland's stomach turn, made him think with horror of the grievous wounds before some of his own deaths.

"I speak of a process," Toland said quietly. "There is precision here, but not machinery. It galls, doesn't it? Olan was a good student, and the shots might have missed." He found himself short of breath, realizing how long it had been since he had fought another Guardian. He was relieved to have found it to be easy, although killing the Ghost was distasteful.

The Void moldered, fell, hit some strange ground.

Light blasted up from the center of the circle, and Toland edged backwards. He expected the light to blast through the surface of the asteroid without touching it, cutting a hole in dimensionality, but instead it stopped as if capped, assuming the shape of a severely square plinth with a burning green base. The Void rolled gently, warmly in front of it as in front of a fire. When Toland raised his hands toward it, his Ghost darted behind them.

"Don't you feel it?" Toland asked.

"It's cold."

Then there was a suggestion of eyes in the green-white burn, a flash of awareness, and a deep voice with a scream somewhere behind it.

Toland felt his shoulders slump as the anticipation released him. It had worked, it had been completed, it had _worked_ and here was this ancient creature, swimming before him like a fish in a bowl, and he could just pluck it out —

"You have conjured this echo of me across space with your trickery." It sounded peevish.

Toland said, "Hello, Savathûn."

* * *

Ikora met his eyes, tracking the unsteady gaze. Confrontations like this were like studying the movements of an enemy in the Crucible: don't want to give too much of your own movements away, but the back-and-forth was practiced. Ikora had faced too many foes to be terrified of Toland, and besides, that name - that was _interesting._

"And how did you know to choose Savathûn as the one to summon?" she asked.

Toland held his hands down, as if shackled, or as if still inscribing the runes that let him summon the Hive. "She was the wise one, the deceptive one. My particular choices reached out to her spirit because of what they meant in the sword-logic. I had read of her in documents held by … well, pointed out to me by … helpful Wizards."

Ikora felt the Speaker's awareness turn minutely toward the trial. "Tell us about that."

"Olan was a good student," Toland said. "He could tell me Jatat-3's Angles in a heartbeat. Never liked other people much, though."

"They aren't all saying it, but they think it's disgusting," Andal said, suddenly. Ikora was as frightened by his truthfulness as by his sudden words. Andal fabricated, teased, imagined, researched in a very Warlock way the hidden trails and bogs of his own ideas. Andal did not often accuse. "You'll come out with it because this is a trial. But since you came back I have gotten the strange sense that you're enjoying this."

Toland shrugged one thin shoulder. His words fired fast, with increasing frenzy. "You simpleton. That's exactly it. I had to like him, you see, I had to respect some part of him in order for the curse to be created and the door to be opened. The sword-logic isn't a cause and effect, it's a law, a direction like the direction of the spin of the galaxy. There's no going the other way, not even if the Traveler tries — "

"So it's resignation, then?" Ikora said, grabbing on to something in Toland's philosophy she thought that she could at least pity. If he was going to go crazy (crazier) on her watch, it would at least be with kind support.

"No no no no _no_. What we _want_ is not the force at all. The Hive know it, the Hive hear - and you're holding your _hands_ over your ears."

"And not reaching for our guns," Andal snapped. Ikora held up a hand for patience, but she was reaching out for the Sun too, starting to stir the energy in the air into something she might have to use. Toland felt it, took a portion of the threat of it into himself with a limp gesture of the Void like a broken-wristed hand. Externally, he slowly blinked his eyes. The crowd was rustling; Ikora could feel pinpricks of power as people hackled and debated.

Toland said, "I had to, you see. Let me tell you some more about Olan."

* * *

Olan was not young. He had gone on many missions, fought at a siege when one of the Towers fell. His fascination with the Hive was newer, growing as they encroached on the Earth. It was a strategist's interest; he wanted to outmaneuver the Hive, and so he followed Toland, trying sometimes to outmaneuver him also.

Olan tended to call his Ghost _little machine_ and put the emphasis, oddly, on the first syllable, preferred shades of blue, drank strong tea.

Savathûn said, "You have conjured this echo of me across space with your trickery."

Toland said, "You are … " Not Oryx, the hammer. "Savathûn, the clever." His thoughts strayed to the journal in his pack. His memory was not always good once he had decided to write something down. He would have to work at it.

"And what are you?"

Toland flung an arm out in a bow, but didn't look down. Taking an eye off of this spirit would be dangerous. "I am an entity in opposition," he said. "I am one of the Warlock Order, seeking to understand the workings of the Hive."

The energy around the column roiled again, shrugged itself into a new position. He felt the edges of the Void shake, as if something was trying to claw its way in out of deep, briny blackness.

"You have built me a pleasant small window," said Savathûn. "What is this at its edges? The universe?"

Toland was taken aback by the gentleness of the words, did not respond. The equations, citations, verses he had used to get to this point were not useful for starting a conversation. Faced finally with the thing he had planned for years to summon, he found it almost underwhelming. Did Savathûn just want to talk?

There was that roiling sensation too, though. Maybe the asteroid had jostled in its orbit.

"I killed for you," Toland shouted. The rumbling was only in his ears and not in the ground, maybe. "I want to learn what your Hive worship when you worship death."

The light moved slowly back and forth, independent of the eyes.

"Where are you? How long has it been for you since the destruction of the Ecumene?"

"I won't tell you the first. I don't know the second. You could enlighten me as to its definition, if you would care to do it."

"Care. I am in a place beyond that," Savathûn said. Toland liked the cadence of the words. "I won't approach you. Others will."

"Why not you?" Toland asked, because it was a place to start. His answer was silence, but the movements in the light became more frantic, so that he thought the creature was trapped in space, somewhere too far away for it to influence the Hive that he knew. "We already know there is a fleet approaching. You might be able to hear its scouts hitting not far from here, if your ears are sharp and … corporeal?"

"Crota," Savathûn hissed. "My sister's spawn."

(Later, Toland looked back and forth between the members of the Vanguard, and chose to focus on one part of Savathûn's statement and not the other. He learned more here than he ever told, and more than he remembered.)

"We know of Crota," he said.

"Crota goes before his mother."

"He is very strong." Toland waited. What psychologies would work on Savathûn's head? He was still so frightened of his own death that he almost shook. There were terrible things in the non-places the thanatonauts went, and the Void especially touched them. Working with nothingness brought one an appreciation of edges, of liminal spaces, and Savathûn knew about those. She must; from what he could ken, she inhabited one.

He could have asked about troop movements first. Instead, he guided their conversation around to this:

Savathûn said, "He is a scrap on a current."

"Whose current?"

"Who do you serve?" Savathûn asked.

Toland hesitated for a moment. "I live under the Traveler."

A spasm in the water. Savathûn said, "Not that current."

"The Darkness, then." He dipped into the Void for a moment to sense it, tapping his fingers against his leg as he did it. Maybe he had been doing that for some time and hadn't realized.

His probing alerted her to something that made her presence sharper, more acidic. "You are an infection," she said.

"I am a seeker! I have read of your gods and charted the lifecycle of your thralls." Would begging impress her? Better to simply lay out what he knew. "Of all the beings in this world, I alone understand the currents of which you speak. You reach into death and draw energy from it. I bargained you this life for an audience."

He stopped, heard his voice echo around his own helmet. (How was she speaking into the vacuum?)

"I'm an not certain you understand our bargains fully, seeker. We live by a great love. We live by simplicity, by the narrowing of the sight. To destroy something is to know it completely. How else can we love it?"

Toland felt the truth of that. That was why Warlocks studied - to see something from all angles, to look at the light it reflected at all frequencies. And if one needed to dissect something to understand it, well, there were opportunities. The Void began to buzz with power. Chills prickled down his back.

"Crota, and your sister. Did you love them?"

"Yes." And Savathûn told him some of Oryx, and some of great dark distances that made him shiver again, because they were not so far away.

Finally he said, "But we have gotten off track," and plucked at the Void.

The sigils he had used and the power he expended meant that he could close the rent at will. He found now that it made an effort to elude him, but he could still grab it, could still chant the words that had once been written on the stone without burning his tongue.

"You want to know about death." Savathûn said.

"Yes."

"Death and life are the same, because killing is the purest expression of love. Its influence flows upward."

Toland had lost the edges of the Void-space some time while she was speaking.

The green light (darkness) wormed (Wormed) its way out of the circle. Before he could lose his senses, Toland closed his eyes.

He heard a song. The words were a drone, a buzz out of which strange tones could only be picked by careful listening. It would be the perfect Warlock study to find those words - to chase down all the false trails and strange anecdotes that lead to their creation, to learn from them the world in miniature.

Savathûn's eyes resolved out of the blackness. She was at the core of this, or, no - she was just the guide to the huge, grotesque family struggle that was the Hive exile/invasion. The song came from someone else, some distant relative, and Toland wanted, even more than he wanted whichever Hive god he could pull out of the ether, to suss it out -

because it teased death, slipped in and out of it, and that was connected to Guardians somehow. Resurrection by Ghost was not like this, but in some ways they had similar notes. (Music, he thought. He had never studied music and here it was, like a new universe.)

If he learned this, he could bypass Ghost resurrection entirely. He wouldn't have to face that woundedness again, and more importantly, he would have done something that no Warlock had ever done before.

That would only be fitting, for him.

Savathûn dragged his awareness away from the song, and some time in the timelessness shortly after that, he realized that she was attacking him.

He hadn't even seen it. She had been subtle, yes, and rawly powerful, but more importantly she was using energies and degrees of precision he had not been used to monitoring. To face the Hive was to face something that worshipped the Darkness, but Savathûn seemed to present the Darkness differently, more visually, less attuned to the notions of causality that he understood. What she thought came into being in this space into which he had been tugged, and now she thought of an ocean, and great pressure.

A ship in the water (or was it a ship in space?), and the song was the tides pulling the waves back and forth, and the song was death itself given energy and made into a doorway. The Hive lives that had touched it flashed in front of him, speaking in their language he almost understood. They wanted to shout at him, wanted to teach him, and _yes_ he wanted that, because they were might and power, and those were all that mattered. It was so _simple_ , yes, the victors take the victory and what else _was_ there?

Except Toland was there, and something knew he shouldn't be, no matter how much he alternatively prostrated himself before and clawed at the great logic of the sword. He was an outsider, a stone stuck in the throat, and he was also the throat while water was pouring down down and he drowned in it.

Somewhere in that maze of memories there was an escape.

There was a surface above the Deep and there was a heaven.

Toland reached up.

It was Savathûn who freed him, her malice and her mockery creating bubbles of pure force and thought that popped like blisters, and the fluid in them was the gray-green rocks. Toland returned to his body halfway through being thrown across the floor. Armor clattered as he slid, smacked against the wall. He was suddenly very aware of his own hand on his leg, of the slightly fibrous, cold texture between the cloth and the grip. Green light flashed again, left after-images that squirmed in long lines from the circle to his eyes. The circle was almost empty now, only a few curves of white chalk separated from their brethren like a page full of commas. There were no burn marks, nothing to indicate that the creature had been present.

Toland's face was freezing.

The stroke of energy had left long, cold rips across his neck and cheek, and suddenly he could feel them. Pain, and blood dripping under his collar, and a terrible shushing sound he could hear vibrating up into his ears directly through his throat. There was a cold pressure in his eye, and strips of metal and armor weave wafted across his vision.

For a moment he felt like he had exactly as much ability to move the walls of the asteroid chamber as to move his hands. Instead of a frightening immobility, it was a motionless power.

His thoughts had shattered like asteroids colliding.

When he tried to speak, he couldn't pull in enough air. "Ampilyne," he croaked.

As soon as the first sound left him the Ghost was already there, building with swift blue grids of light. Toland tried to tell it to build the helmet first instead of attending to his skin, but it had already prioritized. He realized as the armor was built back up that his throat had not been torn out; being exposed to the vacuum had been more shocking than literally breathtaking, and that there was still blood.

He lay back, said, "Ampilyne," again and waited for an acknowledging chirp. He heard it just as he took a grateful, impatient breath. "The dimensionality of death. The green stone beyond. They were so _foolish_ , those stifled Guardians, they refused to learn and now … "

Chirp.

"But I have seen the pathways, the parapets, this breaking … ah, it hurts."

He opened his eyes and found that there were no more spots in his vision. Standing up, he found anew that all the supplies he had placed in the summoning order had disappeared, although the gun was on the floor catty-corner to him. Ampilyne kept rebuilding his face, reaching straight lines of energy through the material of the mask it had already built.

Toland said, "No, no," although it stung.

Ampilyne drifted away. "You are still badly wounded."

Toland shook his head. He didn't know why, but the pain was deep and didn't at all burn like any bullets he knew, and it was forcing his left eye shut. Thanatonauts who went mad stopped feeling the pain, Toland had heard, and he was feeling it.

But part of him had _won_ , and part of him now understood that Savathûn had allowed him a taste of the Hive's addiction, and his survival made him take a few deep breaths that made his lungs stop burning quite so badly.

Ampilyne hovered, nervously shifting.

"It's all right," Toland said, and reached out to cup the nervous Ghost in his hands. "I have found it. I found the one who speaks in the deep, and the rule of law, and you … well, there are towers and there is wreckage."

Ampilyne twitched again, started to say something. Toland wrapped his hands around the Ghost as best he could while it shouted.

He walked back the way he had come, to the surface of the slowly rotating asteroid, and saw the congratulatory crowd of students waiting for him, and felt their pride hit the back of his mind like an asteroid through the Earth.

* * *

Ikora said, "And what did you tell them?

In the Tower, Toland tipped his head to the side, thin, broken strands of hair falling over his eyes. "What I could. I had not yet thought of the complete ramifications of our talk, but there were some theories that could be confirmed only by Savathûn's, one could say, although it is near _criminally_ imprecise, physical manifestation."

"And who was this Savathûn?"

"One of their war lords, I believed."

"And so you told it exactly where we were located?"

He looked at Zavala with darkening disbelief. "Only in as far as the Hive incursion into the Moon had already gone. I am not alone in living in the days of a losing war."

He wasn't wrong about that, but Ikora had wondered to what degree he felt responsible for himself, or for the Tower. The trial was for Olan's death, really, and for the experimentation into the Darkness that it had revealed. She had only needed to chain those ideas together.

Now, there were only a few final preparations to make.

"I thought I would give you the courtesy of telling you that we considered taking your Ghost." Ikora said. She glanced at Zavala, then Brask. "But Ampilyne's own records show that it was complicit only because it had to remain with you, and that it indeed tried to stop some of your more extreme plans. Ampilyne is strong in the Light. We hope one day that you might be, too." She laced her fingers together, looked at Toland expectantly. Ampilyne still hovered over his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," she said. She looked at the Ghost first, then back to her Warlock. She hadn't been Vanguard when he was reborn, but she had suggested things to him when he brought her strange artifacts, and she had been grateful when he had begun to become a teacher. "You will leave this Tower. You will be called the Shattered."

He whispered, "I know."

Toland took a step forward, and Ikora said, "I'm sorry."

The key to Stormcalling was to center oneself, but calling it meditation was limiting; the eye of a storm could not exist without the storm. An expert Stormcaller controlled all three states at once: eye, storm, and the difference between them. She fell into the meditation easily, and placed contact points with quick, electric flicks of her awareness, and made sure, with careful shunts, that she placed the eye over the Vanguard.

The first lightning bolt made Toland stumble; then there were too many to see the space between them, although Ikora could feel each strand whipping out from her hands.

He had already broken, she could feel that; this close to his pretense there was something missing, like a crack in stone.

She broke him again.

She killed him, and gestured to call and trap his Ghost in a tiny maelstrom between her hands. She felt its distraught flickering. The muttering of the crowd increased, and then Ikora glanced at Andal and walked right through the crowd, which broke for her. She took the Ghost wrapped in a shield of electricity finer than most Warlocks could produce. Had Toland even known that she could do it? The Ghost would be able to reconstruct him somewhere else, even if his spirit stayed in digital transit for a while. Behind her, Zavala carried the body over his shoulder.

Ampilyne said, "Where will you take us?"

"Outside the City. You will stay there, or one of us will kill you both."

"He won't stop, you know. He's too interested in searching."

"This way, maybe fewer Guardians will die."

"Fewer. One or two, compared to the war."

Ikora cocked her head. "Are you sympathetic for him?"

"I raised him. Sympathetic … and a little sorry."

Ikora said, "Light willing, you'll both do what you're meant to."

She tightened her grip, ever so slightly edging atoms closer to one another's orbits, feeling the electricity create small bright stars behind her eyes. She held it this way on the elevator, and in the city, and on her Sparrow as she sped across green-gray, frozen fields.

After a while, she let the Ghost go.


End file.
